Dull
by Gwyn Paige
Summary: It's been three years. John's life is back to the way it was before: utterly meaningless. Horribly depressing oneshot. Please review.


The nightmares came back soon enough.

He'd wake up in a cold sweat, hands clammy and trembling, breathing rapidly and deeply as if he was drowning.

He _was _drowning.

Except now the nightmares were worse than ever before, because instead of seeing the dying bodies of his comrades, he saw the falling, bloodied body of his best friend.

He'd usually calm down soon enough. He'd run a hand through his hair and swallow down a sob from somewhere deep in his throat and try to fall back asleep (he never could).

In the morning, when his alarm clock rang at half-past six precisely, he'd get out of bed, glance around his new flat, get ready for work, open his laptop to stare at an empty text box for fifteen minutes, close the laptop, glance at the gun sitting next to him on the desk, try to ignore it, gather up the things he needed to bring to the doctor's office where he now worked (marking the time of that day's therapy session in his planner as he did), grab his cane (for his limp that was definitely absolutely not psychosomatic), and head out.

This was his morning routine.

He tried not to think about it. "It" meaning the past three years living alone, meaning his friend, meaning his death, meaning the fall, meaning the cases, the mysteries, the thrills, the chases, the joy. He tried not to think about much of anything these days. _Just keep moving, John_, he told himself. _Stumble around on a cane, work at the doctor's office, see patients, go to therapy, have nightmares__—__just don't stop to think. Try to forget that it hasn't always been this way. This is all that life holds for you now; there's no use trying to turn it into something more. There _is _nothing more, John. There never was and there never will be anything more. This is what you have to believe._

And he _tried _to believe it. He really did. He tried not to think, he tried to forget, he tried to crawl into himself and put up a protective wall that would shut out all the old, worn-out feelings that he wanted to keep away from his now sturdier, stonier heart.

He did everything he could to end the sadness. He cursed himself, called himself a weakling and a fool, reminded himself that he was a fighter, a _soldier_. He was stronger than this; he'd seen dozens of people die, people he'd known. He'd _killed _a man, for god's sake. Sherlock Holmes was just another man, just another casualty in this great and endless war called being alive.

People are dying all the time, he told himself. He heard Moriarty's voice in his head: "That's what people _do_!"

_But not Sherlock, _a small, repressed voice in the corner of his subconscious would reply. _Sherlock isn't people. He wouldn't just go and do something as dull and predictable as dying; it's not in his nature. He could win an argument with god or the devil, whichever he happened to meet. If anyone could possibly find a way to cheat himself out of death, Sherlock would be the one to do it._

John desperately tried to ignore this tiny, nagging voice. Usually he could silence it effectively and immediately, without much effort. _Don't kid yourself, John. If a man is dead, he's dead. You took his pulse yourself__—__you ought to trust in your own abilities as a doctor, if nothing else._

But sometimes the voice would not go away. It festered in the back of John's mind, driving him up the wall with its insistence that Sherlock Holmes was still somehow amongst the living. And John feared he knew exactly why it remained there.

It was because John, in reality, desperately needed Sherlock to be alive. He might have made a life out of the remains of that horrible day three years ago, but it was a hollow, empty life, and in truth he hated every minute of it.

There was nothing to _live _for anymore. There honestly wasn't. Every damned day was exactly the same. His life had become a monotonous droll, an orderly routine, a meaningless daily checklist of meaningless things that he had to go about doing whether he wished to or not, because he had nothing better to do instead. Life didn't _mean _anything anymore.

_Dull._

John sometimes marveled that he hadn't gone completely bonkers yet. He supposed that this was exactly the way he had lived before he met Sherlock, but it had been different then—oh, so completely different. He hadn't known what he was missing then. He had never experienced a chase through the streets of London at three in the morning, never ridden through twenty-four hours without sleep on nothing but an adrenaline rush, never seen a wonderful, brilliant man put together the pieces of a thread-bare crime scene as if it was the simplest jigsaw puzzle he'd ever seen.

But he had seen it all now, and he feared there was no going back to the blissful ignorance from when he'd been discharged from Afghanistan. He feared that his life would remain even emptier than it had been before his time with Sherlock. And above all he feared that it would be impossible to forget it.

He recalled the words he had spoken to his therapist during his last session before meeting Sherlock: "Nothing happens to me."

How wonderfully wrong he had been.

But now he was back there again. Back in that terrible lull, that empty middle-ground, the purgatory between two wars. The only problem was he didn't think that this one was going to end. There would be no more wars for John Watson.

_You were right, Sherlock, _he thought against his will (he had to forget him, had to pretend he'd never existed), _I do miss the war. I miss it so horribly that I cannot live without it. I need you to be alive. I asked you before: one more miracle, Sherlock. One more magic trick. Can you do that for me, please? Please, Sherlock? See, Sherlock, I'm _begging_._

Some nights he wouldn't have nightmares; he'd just lie there and cry.


End file.
